A Short Quiz Generates a Long List of Leads for PR News

An image of "G R A M M A R" emerges on my screen in tiles from the game Scrabble, with the headline, "How Good Is Your Grammar?"

"Do you correct others on their grammar? Or do you get corrected? See how you stack up..." I'm in.

I click "LET'S GO" to reveal the first question. It's a multiple choice about how concerned with grammar I am. The fourth choice is, "I should probably repeat my 5th grade English class." Five more questions appear testing my farther/further and it's/its knowledge.

At the end, I give an email and a country, and up pops a tough-looking little boy with the message, "You passed by the skin of your teeth. There's always room for improvement, right? Check out the PR News Writer's Guidebook and you'll never miss a typo again! If you don't think you need any more writing tips...how are your crisis management skills?"

"Data shows that 39.4% of people who view this quiz are completing it, 49.7% of people who begin the quiz are completing it, and 99.2% of people completing the quiz are entering their email addresses," wrote Megan Sigg, marketing coordinator for Access Intelligence's PR News, in her 2019 SIPAward-winning entry for Best Lead Generation/Nurturing Campaign.

"Overall results of this lead-generation campaign have exceeded expectations bringing in more than 700 total leads (as of earlier this year); 523 unique leads have been uploaded into the PR News database where 289 completely new names were added and 234 existing records were updated."

Let's face it; we love quizzes. Jeopardy! just started its 36th year, I think (not even counting its original version). My nephew and I caught up on our Baseball Digest quizzes last night, and we were so deflated by the randomness of the questions that I may not renew my subscription. So good quizzes matter in the niche publishing world.

Here are more highlights from PR News' award-winning quiz:

Tools are out there. PR News used the digital tool, Interact, to create the quiz on a topic that resonates with their audience of communicators: grammar usage, typos and pet peeves. CredSpark is a Connectiv/SIPA member that specializes in quizzes.

Humor can work. The PR News Grammar Quiz includes well-placed humor and asked participants to share their pain points to further increase engagement. The last choice of a multiple choice quiz can sometimes be funny but run it by a couple people—everyone's sense of humor is different.

Don't ask for too much. The goal was to require as little information as possible to avoid drop-off, and it worked.

Make sharing easy. Each result page presents a well-recognized image of famous TV characters or a meme and an option to share on personal social media channels (Facebook and Twitter) with a soft drive to be re-directed to one of PRNEWS' live events.

Test, test, test. They saw an instant response with the quiz results and began testing to find the best social media platform and times. The most engagement has been via the Twitter handle @prnews. A stock photo of a pen and paper with a standard message received the least amount of engagement while the most creative image of a pineapple labeled "Grammar Guru" with an appealing message calling out typos received the most engagements.

Find the right times. Over six months of testing, the results were strongest when tweeted in the middle of the night between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. and performed the best on Friday and Saturday nights (hmmm, a new party game?). Users were not only clicking on the link, liking and retweeting the post, but also sharing their results and tagging friends to then participate as well.

The campaign improved with Lytics. To increase reach, they utilized Lytics to implement a campaign as a pop-up on the PR News website in February. The objective was to drive traffic to the quiz and target any visitor to the website that did not have an email address recognized by their system. "The pop-up displayed in the bottom left corner of the window after 3 seconds of being on the site. Any user would see the pop-up a maximum of two times and it would be permanently hidden in the case that the call to action was clicked or the pop-up exited." Up to mid-April, 48,988 unique site visitors came through this campaign with 0.9% conversion rate. Graphics were changed out to try to increase that.

It's a win-win situation. "The importance of these new and updated records is monumental to our marketing efforts as this helps increase brand awareness, product engagement, purchases and event registrations and in turn driving revenue," Sigg wrote. "Updated records are just as important as brand-new names ensuring our deliverability percentages remain strong and we can be sure to be contacting valid, live email accounts."

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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 and SIIA in 2013 as editorial director…